1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and a toner bottle arranged to supply toner to the image forming apparatus. More specifically, the present invention relates to a configuration for ensuring incompatibility between the image forming apparatus and the toner bottle.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional image forming apparatus forms an image on paper using toner. When an image forming apparatus of this type has run out of toner, it is common to supply toner by replacing a toner bottle (toner cartridge).
When manufacturing such image forming apparatuses, a manufacturer of the image forming apparatus is at times supplied with a plurality of types of toner and photoconductive drums or the like by a components maker. Upon receiving such supplies, the manufacturer selects an appropriate specific combination of toner and a photoconductive drum from among a plurality of possible combinations of the toner and the photoconductive drums to manufacture the image forming apparatus, and then supplies the image forming apparatus to consumers. More specifically, the manufacturer of the image forming apparatus or the components maker conducts experiments to test development performance or the like of actual combinations of the toner and the photoconductive drum. Then, only the combination of the toner and the photoconductive drum that has been determined to be sufficiently usable as the image forming apparatus can be adopted for products.
Accordingly, if toner on which such a combination testing has not been performed is mistakenly supplied to the image forming apparatus, the image forming apparatus may be adversely affected. Therefore, in order to prevent a toner bottle having a certain specification from being attached to image forming apparatuses of other specifications, a shape of a toner bottle attaching portion of the image forming apparatus and a shape of the toner bottle may be changed with respect to each specification so as to provide incompatibility to the toner bottle.
However, when changing the shape of the toner bottle and the shape of the image forming apparatus with respect to each specification for production, a die is required each time, which thereby can increase a manufacturing cost of the toner bottle and the image forming apparatus.
Considering this point, some toner bottles and image forming apparatuses achieve different specifications by changing an angle (rotation phase) of a component that ensures incompatibility and then attaching such a component to the toner bottle and the image forming apparatus.
In such an image forming apparatus, when attaching a toner cartridge, for example, an operator manually rotates the toner cartridge by 180 degrees so as to drop toner contained therein all at once.
In another known configuration, after a toner bottle is attached, the toner bottle is continuously or intermittently rotated by a motor so as to supply toner from the toner bottle by degrees. However, in the above configuration, the toner bottle cannot be rotated by 180 degrees or more. Therefore, such a configuration cannot be applied to drive and rotate the toner bottle.